Free Law Project’s role in this grant will be to acquire court opinions and orders from PACER, and to provide them to Alexander and Feizollahi for their research. Because PACER is not optimized for automated access, a key outcome of the grant will be to develop tools and infrastructure to enable other researchers to utilize PACER data through future grants.

“PACER data is too difficult for researchers to access, and it’s high time that a centralized service be created by a non-profit to gather this kind of data for researchers,” says Michael Lissner, Founder and Executive Director of …

Free Law Project is excited to announce that over the next several
months we will be collaborating with the University of Baltimore and
Assistant Professor of Law, Colin Starger, to build a web-based version
of his Supreme Court Mapping
Project, a
software-driven effort to visualize Supreme Court doctrine. Currently a
desktop software tool, the collaboration will move this functionality to
the web, incorporating it directly into Free Law Project’s
CourtListener platform.

Once incorporated into CourtListener, users will be able to create
visualizations of how different cases cite each other, including
plotting them against variables from the Supreme Court
Database such as whether the case had
a liberal or conservative outcome, and the minority/majority votes of
the justices. Using the CourtListener citation API, Colin and his
partner Darren Kumasawa have done a lot of work in this area already,
laying a great foundation for this project.

The current design

We hope that within a few months our new service will go live, and that
teachers, librarians, and researchers will be able to create great new
visualizations of Supreme Court doctrine. If you’ve been watching Colin
and Darren’s work over on …

Free Law Project is pleased to announce that its OpenJudiciary.org has
been selected as a winner of the Knight News Challenge on Elections, an
initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The new project will make judicial elections more transparent for
journalists and researchers by creating online profiles of judges.
Profiles will show campaign contributions, judicial opinions, and biographies.

A site such as OpenJudiciary.org is needed because big money is
infiltrating the judicial election process. Academic research has shown
that election years correlate with judges handing down harsher
sentences, even an increased frequency of death sentences.

The money in state judicial elections appears to cause not only a public
perception of partiality (judges being bought), but also real damage to
judicial impartiality as judges are forced to fundraise from the
attorneys and litigants that appear in their courts.

Free Law Project co-founder Brian Carver said, “It is currently
extremely difficult for voters, journalists, or academics to investigate
a judge’s past decisions and …

Co-Founder Brian Carver and I presented at Columbia’s Web Archiving
Conference last month and the videos have now been posted on YouTube.
Brian gave a substantial talk about Juriscraper and how we used a grant
from Columbia to expand it to cover all fifty states:

Yesterday the impressive DC Legal Hackers
group held their first annual Le Hackie
Awards and Holiday
Party. Although
we weren’t able to attend the event (it was in D.C.), we’re proud and
gratified to share that Free Law Project played a part in two of the top
ten legal hacks of the year. The first was for our new Oral Arguments
feature that we’ve been blogging so much about lately, and the second
was for Frank Bennett’s Free Law
Ferret,
which he built using code originally developed for CourtListener.

Update: Turns out the Free Law Ferret was from 2013 and was not
awarded a Le Hackie Award. Our mistake was to trust a slide from the
presentation, which contained a typo.

Brian and I couldn’t be happier to see the legal hacking community grow
and we’re humbled to be a part of it. So much fantastic work is getting
done each year, and the legal arena is growing and maturing at a
feverish pace. We hope that the DC Legal Hackers will keep …

Last week legal publisher Fastcase included Free Law Project
co-founders, Brian Carver and Michael Lissner on the company’sannual
list of “Fastcase 50” award
recipients. As their
press
release
explains, “The Fastcase 50 award recognizes 50 of the smartest, most
courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law.”

Michael and I are humbled by and grateful for this recognition. We’re
especially thrilled to see individuals we have worked with included on
this year’s list, such as:

Frank Bennett, who created the Free
Law
Ferret,
adapting some of CourtListener’s citation-finding code to JavaScript
and enabling users of the extension to find citations on any website
and then get the documents from CourtListener.

Jake Heller, CEO of
CaseText, whose team there has frequently
been a helpful sounding board when Mike and I are thinking through
the interesting questions that arise when trying to put useful legal
research tools on the web.

Colin Starger, of the University
of Baltimore School of Law, with whom we’ve had great conversations
about citations, metadata, and bulk downloads, not topics of
conversation that everyone has as much experience with as Colin!

Today, teams across the country are hard at work on the Aaron Swartz
Memorial
Grants.
These grants, offered by the Think Computer Foundation, provide $5,000
awards for three different projects related to RECAP.

We are delighted to announce additional awards. The generous
folks over at Google’s Open
Source Programs team have pledged to support two more RECAP-related
project awards — at $5,000 each. These are open to anyone who wishes
to submit a proposal for a significant improvement to the RECAP system.
We will work with the proposers to scope the project and define what
qualifies for the award. All projects must be open source.

There are several potential ideas. For instance, someone might propose
add support to RECAP for displaying the user’s current balance and
prompting the user to liberate up to their free quarterly $15
allocation as the end of the quarter approaches (inspired by Operation
Asymptote). Someone
might propose to improve the
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/ interface, and
to improve detection and removal of private information. Someone might
propose some other idea that we haven’t thought of. You may wish to
watch the discussion of a few of these initial
ideas …

Last week, our community lost Aaron
Swartz.
We are still reeling. Aaron was a fighter for openness and freedom, and
many people have been channeling their grief into positive actions for
causes that were close to Aaron’s heart. One of these people is Aaron
Greenspan, creator of
the open-data site Plainsite and the Think
Computer Foundation. He has established
a generous set of grants to be awarded to the first person (or group)
that develops the following upgrades to
RECAP, our court record liberation
system. RECAP would not
exist
without the work of Aaron Swartz.

Three grants are being made available related to RECAP. Each grant is
worth $5,000.00:

Grant 1: Develop and release a version of RECAP for the Google
Chrome browser that matches the current Firefox browser extension functionality

Grant 2: Develop and release a version of RECAP for Internet
Explorer that matches the current Firefox browser extension functionality